Anamchara
by midnight-blue
Summary: What if Samantha's mother hadn't found her at the bus stop?
1. Part 1

Title: Anamchara 

Authors: Running Up Fawn and Midnight Blue 

Rating: PG-13 

Disclaimer: All characters related to Without a Trace belong to Hank Steinberg, Bruckheimer, and CBS. We own nothing. 

Author's Note: RUF and I came up with this idea regarding Samantha's comment from VfH and how not only her life, but Jack's and everyone else's around her, would've been affected if her mom hadn't found her. As for the ages, we're putting Samantha as 17 when she ran away and Jack at 27 when she ran away. So we present you with this little WIP. Thanks, as always, to Maple Street, the best forum around! 

Summary: What if Samantha's mother hadn't found her at the bus stop? 

_anamchara_: soulmate 

~*~ 

And now we're grown up orphans that never knew their names. It's lonely where you are, come back down and I won't tell 'em your name   
-_Name_ by the Goo Goo Dolls 

~*~ 

He saw her face once, in a picture. An old, worn, faded picture. One that had been fondled and folded and creased and smudged with newspaper ink and fingerprints and hot tears that stung disbelieving eyes as worlds stopped and ended with her disappearance. 

He'd known her only by this picture -- this picture that ensured she would never age from this moment, never be more than the innocent, carefree teenager awaiting the chance to step away from her sheltered world and really live for once, really become who she knew she could always be. 

He'd known her name from the smeared ink, her birthday, the color of her eyes and her hair and even the way her lips seemed to curve skyward in unconscious observance of the deity who'd given her life, the one who could take it away just as quickly. 

So he'd known these things, the things you see on the outside, the things you identify a person's face with. But you couldn't really know someone, know them fully, until you watched them and heard them speak and knew their favorite things and favorite places, their morals and convictions and every little nuance that, piece by piece, formed together a whole person. 

And that was when he wanted to know her. Know the person behind the stormy eyes, the person looking at him from her frozen prison as if to say, 'save me'; and he started to think maybe he could someday, that maybe someday he really could know her. 

Jack Malone, when he'd been 27, saw a picture once of Samantha Spade. He liked her then, liked her before he knew her, liked her as his eyes caught hers and he read her name and thought of the sound her name would make as it slipped slowly from his tongue. 

_Sam Spade_. 

He liked her then and his hand brushed over her face as he held her picture. 

She'd been missing for two days. Two days more, perhaps, than time would allow. Maybe as he stood she was already gone. 

But he hoped in his soul she still lived and waited for him, for someone to come along and save her. 

Because, he thought, we all need to be saved. 

* 

_Ten years ago..._

Eleven minutes to twelve and ten steps to the door. 

Before she took a single one, Samantha Spade drew a deep, shuddering breath and attempted to slow her racing heart. 

The interior of her home, her shelter for seventeen years of existence, the place that should have been her haven, her light, was blacker tonight than she had ever seen it. 

She blended into the darkness, donned in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt that served to cover her golden hair, hair that only minutes before she'd pulled into a tight ponytail in front of the mirror in her bedroom, nodding at her reflection for the last time. 

Sheer will had allowed her to close that door with barely a final glance back, but she couldn't stop herself from hesitating for a fraction of a second outside her parents' bedroom. 

_I'm sorry, Mom.._

Without a sound, Samantha trailed her fingers down the side of the doorway, capturing in her mind what would be her last image of the woman who brought her life, the woman whose own existence was slowly, quietly, fading out of her weakening grasp. 

A twinge of regret and indecision struck Samantha, but it was eradicated the moment her gaze shifted to the familiar emptiness on the opposite side of her mother's bed. 

Her father never returned home before two in the morning, a fact that she both fiercely loathed and desperately counted on. 

Tightening the straps on the backpack she'd pulled across her shoulders, Samantha walked the final ten steps to the door with her eyes closed. She didn't see her hand reach out and turn the metal knob, nor did she catch a parting glimpse of the darkened hallway, or carpeted floor, or half-open closet, or sleeping cat, or.. 

Or the life she was leaving behind. 

The walk--along the grass so as not to leave a trail of footprints--was so familiar to Samantha that she could allow her mind to wander, all the while making certain she was protected from sight by the combined efforts of darkness and overhanging tree branches. 

It was the third time that week she'd journeyed along this silent road. The first time, her initial practice run, she'd almost lost her nerve and turned back. Giving up wasn't a thought Samantha Spade entertained often, however, and so she'd swallowed her fears and continued on, heading back home only after she'd gone as far as time would allow. 

The second trial, only two nights before, left her with a strange mixture of exhilarated relief and heart-pounding terror. 

The wait was over. Was she ready? 

She had to be. It was leave, or stay and suffocate, stay and weaken, stay and watch him destroy her with agonizing subtlety until one day there was nothing left to ruin and he turned his sights on his daughter.. 

Slinking through the overgrown grass, she came upon the half-hidden sign that informed motorists they were now leaving her town. 

She didn't let herself spare a moment, and merely continued on, aware that this wasn't a practice or a trial, this time it was real and there was no turning back. 

Careful research promised a bus station in roughly ten miles, and Samantha had the schedule memorized down to the minute. 

New York City, departing at 4:18 AM. 

There was a back-up at 6:27, but Samantha didn't plan on missing the first. 

She didn't have any idea where in New York City she was going, or what she would do when she got there. 

What she did have was money slowly obtained over months of saving, a week's supply of clothing, and a burning hope combined with the desire to live. To live, because it wasn't, had never been, would never be, enough for Samantha Spade to merely exist. 

Here, she would exist until eventually she became nothing more than a shell of herself, a faint reminder of the girl she had once been and the dreams she'd lost along the way. 

There, though..there she would have more to hold onto than faded dreams and whispers of something better. 

There, she could breathe, and grow, and live. 

* 

_Ten years later..._

They didn't tell you when you started how this job, this life, would consume you. It made you good, of course, made you passionate and focused on finding who needed to be found and bringing closure to a mother, a father, a husband, and wife. 

They didn't tell him it would bleed into him, and that's what it did. Somewhere along the way, Jack Malone stopped being who he once was and started defining himself by the people he needed to find. He stopped being Maria's husband and Hanna and Kate's father -- he stopped being who he had always been. 

Jack Malone had become them; the ones he wiped away in mere seconds, the ones he put in dusty file cabinets to be forgotten, the ones whose names used to be called across family rooms and classrooms and picnics and even parks perhaps on sunny days when life once made sense. He wiped away the names who were once more than names. He wiped away whole people. 

And it hurt. 

So he thought about her sometimes, sometimes when he wanted to and sometimes when he really didn't; those tended to be the times she became most vivid and real and he could almost touch her and bring her back. Sometimes, like today, he wanted to write her name on the whiteboard just to make her real again for even a second. 

Sometimes, she came to him in dreams and whispered his name and begged him to find her. He would touch her hair and say a prayer and turn away with nothing but his stained hands and hollow apologies. 

He started wishing for things he didn't need and his fears pushed Maria out until they reached a point where he forgot what her lips tasted like, how her hair felt as he ran his fingers through it. He started to forget her favorite song and it occurred to him that maybe he'd never known, so he'd think of Samantha again and wonder what her favorite song was, what it had been, and that maybe if he knew her -- he would never forget. 

He walked past his colleagues, his coat wet from the rain outside, and headed towards his office like usual. The routine of it was the one thing he clung to, the one thing he could count on. 

"Jack, someone here to see you, " Danny remarked as he walked by. 

A good worker, Danny Taylor; passionate and driven and maybe a little too reckless, but his heart was in the right place. He tended to keep to himself though and Jack always wondered that maybe if circumstances and even the people in his life were different, he too would be. 

He would always wonder, but never know. 

As he made his way to his office, he caught a glimpse of the woman waiting for him. Her hair was old, her skin, aged and worn; what struck him most was the emptiness in her eyes and he wondered how long it had been there. He wondered if maybe she'd always had it or if maybe once her eyes had danced with love and laughter. She had become a gray ghost. 

He shook her hand and gestured for her to sit, waiting for her to speak. She seemed hesitant at first, as though her need to be here was ridiculous and pointless, but she eventually reached inside her purse, pulled out a picture, and held it to her chest. 

"This will seem odd, Agent Malone, but I -- I need you to find someone for me." 

"Why is that odd, Missus, uh?" 

"Oh, Spade, sorry. Janet Spade." 

His heart skipped a beat, but he gestured her to continue. 

"It's odd, Agent Malone, because my daughter has been missing for ten years." 

He blinked and fumbled with his tie, a nervous reaction he unconsciously reacted to tense situations with. 

"Mrs. Spade, I don't mean to be rude, but why come to us all these years later?" 

"Because I'm dying, Agent Malone, and I can't --" 

Her hands shook and she held the picture tightly to her chest. 

"I can't go away without knowing. Even if she's -- even if she's dead, I just have to know." 

"Why do you think she's in New York or anywhere near here?" 

"She always talked about coming here, she was so excited about leaving to go to a big city and -- and I just think she's here." 

"Was she kidnapped or --" 

"I guess there's always that possibility, but I -- I think she ran away." 

"Why would she have done that, problems at home?" 

Janet Spade looked away for a moment, as though her own ghosts started dancing before her in that question as she clung to her daughter's picture. 

"Because I -- I lost her. I lost her a long time ago." 

The faint whisper of her solem confession clung to his heart in the place he'd already tucked Samantha Spade away in. 

"Wasn't there an investigation of some kind?" 

"Yes, of course, but they said she had left most likely of her own free will and I needed to accept that, but I can't, how can anyone expect me to?" 

"Mrs. Spade, I'm sorry for your loss, but I don't know what I can do here. She could be anywhere, she could've started a life of her own, she could be on the street in some -- some junkie house, she could be..." 

"Dead, yes, I know. And I'm willing to accept it if that's the truth. But I need to at least know. That's all I want." 

He looked at his hands, ran one down his face, and wove his fingers together. 

It seemed as if God himself was throwing Samantha Spade in his face and saying, 'Here, find her.'He'd reached a point he'd thought about ten years ago himself when he'd first seen her picture and smiled sadly and never let her leave his mind. 

It seemed she never would and Samantha Spade was going to find him just as he found her and they would become something together in their own time apart. And he would find her, he knew, find her alive or dead, or maybe half-alive, as they sometimes were; like the hollow chamber of a dark cave that seemed to scream for an escape. 

So he shook her hand again, took the picture from her reluctant hands, and promised a fate he couldn't be certain of. He turned, hands in his pockets, and watched the rain fall. 

The possibility of her return seemed as bleak as the sun shining on a day like today -- a day when the rain baptized the city in fire and it wept. 

The city wept today as his hands shook with her picture. It was a different one. She had been caught unaware, looking off at something -- a person perhaps or a favorite memory as she watched her life move around her. 

He'd seen pictures like these before, pictures he would always see in darkness and dreams. But today, it was different, different in a way he couldn't explain. Maybe it was different today because he looked at her and she seemed to bleed a sadness he wanted to wipe away. 

It was different today. 

Because today, he bled with it. 

And he wrote her name in ink. 

* 

TBC... 


	2. Part 2

**A/N:** Thank you all so much for the feedback, we're eternally grateful and hope you like this next part. Enjoy! 

* 

"Here you go." 

Samantha placed the tall drink in front of a slim, dark-haired woman, and was startled when she looked up to reveal a face no older than Samantha's own twenty-seven. Her eyes, though, held an aching world of quiet experience and an all-too familiar look of reluctant resignation. Samantha wanted to shake the woman by her shoulders and whisper fiercely, "Don't end up like me." 

Ten years in the city that boasted dreams as a reality and here she was, working late nights in a seedy bar only to return home, fall into an exhausted sleep, and head out in the infant hours of the morning to clean rooms at one of the three nearby hotels. 

And she was lucky. 

Ten years ago, Samantha Spade stepped off the bus and into the whirlwind that was New York City. Exhausted, she crept into the first abandoned warehouse she found and fell asleep against the grime-covered wall. Less than two hours later, the teenager had been jolted awake by the taunts of four middle-aged, leering men, who wasted no time in letting her know the price she was going to pay for making the warehouse her temporary shelter. 

A terrified Samantha fled, blinking back tears as she searched for a place to call her own. 

Days passed in a blur of dodging inappropriate advances, eating when she could, sleeping in doorways, frequenting the laundromat in a compulsive attempt to maintain at least a shred of dignity, and after a month she found herself on a familiar streetcorner, clutching a quarter in her right palm and the payphone in her left. 

Sick and gaunt, broken and alone, Samantha lifted a shaking finger to the keys, ready to punch in her home phone number and let the ringing signal her ultimate defeat. It was then that the large white sign bearing "Free Women's Clinic" in black letters caught her attention, and, in a haze of hunger and pain, she placed the phone back in its holder and stumbled across the street, entering the brick building that was to be her salvation. 

She'd entered with nothing, and left with treatment, a place to stay, and a friend. 

Ana Rolon, the hospital's large and cheerful nurse's aide, had sighted on Samantha from the moment she walked through the door. Proclaiming her in need of a good meal, the two had shared lunch, and Samantha gave the older woman the barest details of her story. By the end, Ana insisted on sharing her tiny apartment with Samantha. 

_It's not much, but it's better than nothing._

And it was. 

The two developed a comfortable rapport and routine--Samantha, honest when she could be and lying when it was necessary, eventually found work at a local grocery store, and their combined salaries allowed them to live for more than the next meal. 

For the first few months, Samantha searched the papers for any mention of herself or her disappearance, but it hadn't traveled to the city, and she began to think ahead instead of behind. 

She wasn't exactly fulfilling her dreams, but she was young, and the hope that had been enough to propell her from the prison of her home to the freedom of the city had slowly returned, seeping into everything she did and every word she spoke. 

Until one day, it all fell apart. 

Ana, the victim and product of years of drug abuse and addiction, had been clean long before Samantha walked through the doors of the clinic. 

That night, though, in a moment of weakness and temptation, Ana pressed the needle to her skin once again, dark eyes full of both sorrow and indignance as they gazed steadily at the desperate, shocked Samantha. 

"Just this once," she had promised, even as she emptied the syringe into her arm. "It'll be okay." 

But it wasn't. 

On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Samantha watched her friend and benefactor overdose on the same drug she'd fought so hard to cut out of her life. 

The next morning, the sun rose and the world continued on, and Samantha ran ahead of it. 

Ana's death left her with a cut deeper than she was willing to let heal, and so she merely covered it, taking on a second job and then a third, working herself into a state of exhaustion so when she stumbled home at night, she could avoid the demons that stalked her alone in the darkness. 

Days rolled together, months turned to years, and dreams faded to whispers until they were so faint she could no longer hear them. 

It was only times like these, when she saw herself in the defeated eyes of another, that the dreams returned, swirling, dancing, hovering just out of her ever-weakening reach. 

As she returned home that night, always home to the cold and to the dark, Samantha reflected on that night so many years ago, when she'd crept out of a house just as frozen and black as this one. 

She'd done everything possible to ensure that she wouldn't be followed, wouldn't be discovered, wouldn't be found. 

Pulling the thin blanket to her chin, a single tear--the only one she had left--crept down her cheek, as she quietly admitted that now, she would give anything to be found. 

* 

When people die, the finality of that end brings an undetermined sense of peace to those who knew them. When people go missing, missing for years and years until all the details of what they looked like and who they were fade away with them as well, they seem to no longer belong to who they once did. They're no longer just someone else's daughter or sister or son or brother; they find themselves in not only those they left behind, but in those who want to find them. 

So Samantha Spade started belonging to Jack Malone the moment he opened a manila folder and paper-clipped her picture to it; the moment he wrote down her birthdate and physical description; the moment he uncapped the marker and wrote her name and thought of how she once may have wrote it herself; the moment he stopped letting her be an unknown; the moment he wanted her to be real again. 

* 

"Where do we even start, Jack?" 

"We start where she started, " he replied, leading Vivian outside as he pulled the collar of his trenchcoat over his head. 

"And that would be where?" 

"Amherst. It's upstate. Very quiet, very peaceful -- kind of place you'd want to leave if you're a restless teenager." 

"And she did, " Vivian remarked as they pulled away, her voice carrying above the loud swish of the windshield wipers as rain pelted the window. 

He nodded. 

"She did. And we're going to find out why." 

"Maybe she just got bored." 

"And she wouldn't have called for ten years? No, there's something more here, Viv. I owe it to her mother...I owe it to her." 

Vivian's eyebrows lifted. 

"We can't find them all, Jack, " she spoke resignedly, running a hand along the window sill. 

"No, but we can try." 

"Thank you for seeing me, Agent Malone, for taking this case, " Janet Spade spoke as she ushered Jack and Vivian inside. 

Jack nodded politely and smiled. 

"This is Agent Johnson, Viv, this is Janet Spade, " he waved a hand between the two and watched them shake hands. 

They followed Janet through the house as she led them further into what had once been Samantha's house. He felt something wash over him, something he didn't fully understand, but felt deeply and profoundly nonetheless. 

He felt her. 

He paid attention to the pictures on the walls and the state of the house itself. It was beautiful in its simplicity, a house you could imagine spending your entire life in, no matter where it was. A house, he thought, that looked so perfect on the outside, it had to be anything but on the inside. 

His mind thought of her as he walked on the carpet and imagined the sound her feet must've made as she ran through it with excitement as a young child, possibly once to jump into her mother's arms or her father's; he imagined the sound she must've made when grades were bad and her heart had been broken. 

He imagined the sound she must've made when she left this house; the sound no one could ever forget. Because it was the sound of an infinite silence, final in its impact. 

Janet motioned them to the couch, taking a seat across from them as Jack smoothed out his trenchcoat and pulled out his notebook and pen. 

"Okay, Mrs. Spade, let's just start at the beginning -- what was Samantha like as a child?" 

He would never forget the way her mouth lifted into a smile and the way her eyes teared up simultaneously. 

"She was -- she was all I had ever wanted. She was just the sweetest little girl, she used to -- she used to crawl in my lap sometimes and just sit there and sing to herself and tell me stories about princesses and dragons. You never had to tell her anything, and she was so smart. She could just sit there and entertain herself." 

"So what changed?" Vivian asked, knowing this picture being painted had to have smeared and dripped its colors dry. 

Janet folded her hands in her lap, looked down. 

"Uh, well, her father and I had problems and it got worse as she got older -- she saw most of the fights. And he drank, drank a lot sometimes." 

Jack drew a silent breath and asked, "Did he hit her?" 

She shook her head quickly. 

"No, no, never. He was a verbal abuser, I guess you could say. He didn't have to touch her, all he had to do was speak. He used to -- sometimes he would say horrible things and I just -- I don't know why I let him do that. I should've -- should've stopped him. He never hugged her or kissed her or told her he loved her." 

A few stray tears fell. 

"I don't think he even cared that she disappeared. I think he was happy." 

"How did he treat you, Mrs. Spade?" 

"I used to pretend it was nothing, until she left and I realized that my not doing anything was just as bad as his actions. I think he liked it most when I cried, and Sam saw most of it, she used to hug me when it got really bad, just sit there and hug me. A daughter shouldn't have to do that." 

"No. But neither should a mother. Where's your husband now?" 

"We divorced soon after Sam left. He still lives here, but I haven't seen him in years." 

Vivian leaned forward and asked, "Did she have any boyfriends or friends who might have known where she went?" 

"She had some casual friends, but no one really close to her. She did have a boyfriend for a couple of years, he used to tell me he was going to marry her, but -- I think if he knew where she went, he would've said something." 

"Does he still live here as well?" 

"Yes, just a few blocks over, in fact." 

"We'd like his address then, and your ex-husband's as well." 

Janet nodded and stood up. 

Vivian leaned closer to Jack, whispered to him, "I don't blame her for wanting to leave." 

He nodded in agreement. "I don't blame her for not coming back." 

They stood as Janet re-entered the room and Jack took the piece of paper with the addresses on it, folding it into his pocket. 

"Thank you again, Agent Malone." 

"We'll do our best, Mrs. Spade." 

They started to leave and she spoke once more. 

"I don't think she knew." 

"Knew what?" 

"That I loved her, " her voice replied, distant and haunted. 

"Why would you think that?" 

"Because sometimes I forgot to tell her too." 

* 

_We can't find them all..._

He jotted down a few more notes. Tomorrow, they would speak to Samantha's father and boyfriend and find out more about who she had been and where she had wanted to go in her life, what she wanted and needed and had to have to simply live. 

He thought of Maria suddenly, the woman he had once been in love with, once when he was young and she had been the first woman to look at him as though he mattered. And maybe that was stupid and he had been naive, but it had been enough once. 

But he had grown and she had grown and they had grown separately from one another, so distant, in fact, that sometimes he forgot who was attached to the ring on his finger. And it bothered him, but he didn't know what to do about. 

He knew he didn't want this anymore, didn't want the cold, hollow void in his heart he got whenever he looked at her. He didn't want to pretend, didn't want to force a love that wasn't there. But it scared him, too, to leave and be on his own, without any other person to turn to. Sometimes the idea of being utterly alone scared him more than being with her and he thought that soon, maybe sooner than he liked, he would have to make a decision. 

He needed to find himself, and maybe, in that journey, he would find Samantha as well. 

_We can't find them all..._

Maybe not, he thought. 

But maybe, in the bleakness of that resolution, there existed hope enough to find her; hope and even love enough to save her. 

And he would, he thought. 

He would. 

* 

"And the princess was so brave, she went to fight the big scary dragon all by herself..." 

"Then what happened? Did the prince save her?" 

"Oh Mom, you're silly. _She_ saved _him_! She saved him and she loved him and he loved her and that's what happened." 

The sudden slam back to reality left Samantha gasping for breath and drenched in sweat as she untangled herself from her knot of blankets, the dream still playing in her mind even as it slowly faded from view, leaving her with only its sharp, pointed aftertaste. 

_Let me tell you a story, okay Mom?_

In the dark, she fumbled through the drawer next to her bed, relaxing when her fingers closed around a once-glossy, now used and worn photograph. Samantha didn't need to turn on the light; the image of her five year old self wrapped in her mother's arms as they beamed for the camera had long been burned into her memory, held in a safe and secret place she could slip to when the dragons were too strong for the princess to fight alone. 

Samantha had no tears left, or she would have wept for the photograph and the people in it, for innocence lost and shattered, stolen and forgotten. 

As she waited for morning to break across the inky blackness of the night, Samantha sent up a silent prayer for herself at five, for herself at twenty-seven, for all the things she'd been along the way..for her mother, wherever she was and whatever she had become, and in a final, desperate moment, returned to the place of princesses and dragons, and prayed without words for her prince. 

She was tired of fighting alone. 

* 

He stood in front of her, hands jammed deep in his pockets, examining, studying, searching. 

She didn't move or blink, because for now she was still just a picture, but Vivian had never seen Jack look upon anyone more intently than at this moment as he stood guard over Samantha Spade's photograph. 

_I owe it to her..._

Watching him from the safety of her cubicle, she took in his rigid posture, the stubborn lift of his head, the way he moved his hand from his pocket and reached upward, almost as if to brush the errant lock of blonde hair from her forehead as she gazed steadily back at him.. 

This, Vivian knew, was not the same as any other case she had ever worked with Jack Malone. She worried about him sometimes--worried that the turmoil of their job was beginning to take its toll, worried about his marriage, worried that he didn't get to see his daughters enough... 

But this was a different kind of worry. For the first time in their years together, Jack's promise to find the young woman in the photograph was more than standard reassurance. 

He'd taken Samantha Spade on as a personal battle, made it his task to search and recover and, ultimately, save the girl who had left her world behind so many years ago. 

Before turning away, Vivian caught the mouthed "I will" falling from Jack's lips as he took a long, final look at her photograph, dropping his eyes only after he was certain her face would never fade from his memory. 

* 

TBC... 


	3. Part 3

**A/N**: Thanks to all for the reviews. You rock, as always. 

* 

"Checked the hospital records from the last ten years -- no Jane Does match her description." 

Martin slid the files across the table as he walked in with the new recruit, Kathleen Astor. Jack kept her under silent scrutiny, as he did with each new recruit, and shared a look with Martin who assured him she'd done well. 

"Viv's with the father and ex-boyfriend, so I want you two scouting out the homeless shelters and, geez -- alleys, even." 

He watched them go, flipped open his phone and asked Vivian for some good news. 

"I can't say good, but if I wasn't sure before, I'm one hundred percent positive she had every reason to leave with a father like that. Guy's a liver failure waiting to happen. Ex-boyfriend's decent, seems like he genuinely cared about her, but I don't think she really let anyone know her -- he didn't know she was planning to leave. Said she was probably better off, though." 

"You believe that?" 

"No." 

"Well, we'll decide that when we find her." 

"Right. Jack, we're not getting any leads are we?" 

He hesitated before he spoke, "Nothing yet, but I've got Martin and Kathy out at the homeless shelters, Danny hitting up the restaurants, grocery stores, bars, clubs -- someone has to know something, Viv." 

"She might not even be in the city anymore, Jack. This kind of thing --" 

"I know, Vivian, but let's give it a few days, all right. If we don't find her, she's gone, Viv." 

"She might be already." 

"Then we'll deal with it if that's the case." 

"All right. I'm going to hang out here for a little while more, talk to some of her former teachers, classmates." 

"Okay. Check back in a couple of hours." 

"Will do." 

He clicked off the phone and gathered some files as he draped his coat over his arm. He had Danny covering the Lower East Side down to the Financial District, and decided to head himself to the Upper East and West sides, though he doubted very much she would be there. 

Unless by some miracle she had acquired a small fortune over the last few years, he figured they might have more luck hitting the cheaper areas of New York City and venturing further away from Tribeca, SoHo, and really all parts of Manhattan -- heading into Staten Island and Brooklyn instead. 

He hoped he was right. 

* 

"She'd look older than this now, but you get the idea, " Danny said, tucking the picture of Samantha into his coat. 

"How old did you say she was?" The bartender asked, wiping down the countertop. 

"She'd be 27 now, 17 when she disappeared." 

"Shame. Bad home?" 

"Always is." 

"Sad eyes, " he spoke, putting a few glasses on hooks over the bar. 

"Excuse me?" 

"Sad eyes. She's got sad eyes. Think I seen a kid like that once 'bout six months ago. Lookin' for a job as a bartender, good money in it, you know? She was waitressing 'cross the bridge in Brooklyn Heights. Had a cheap apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I gave her some advice." 

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah -- told her to get the hell out of Bed-Stuy -- dangerous place for a young, pretty, white girl like her to be. Told her to get out, find a nice place in Battery Park or East Village, but figured she couldn't afford it. She could've gone to at least the Upper East Side and it would've been cheaper and safer, but, you know, sometimes they don't listen." 

"Did she?" 

He nodded. "She got a new place." 

"She tell you where?" 

"Near Central Park, I think -- south of Harlem. I don't know -- above Little Italy, she could be anywhere in between, far as I know, I wasn't her keeper or nothin', just shoved her along a little." 

He held up a finger to Danny as he assisted a customer, then turned his attention back on the agent, making a Godfather as he mixed amaretto and scotch, dropped a few ice cubes and a small straw in the glass and slid it down the countertop. 

Slinging his bar towel back over his shoulder, he spoke, "Anyway, like I said, she's got these sad eyes so when she looked at ya -- ya couldn't look away. She was one of the good ones -- I hope ya find her." 

Danny put away his notebook. 

"I hope so too, Mr. Anglin. Thanks for your help." 

"No problem. Course, I guess they're the hardest to find, huh?" 

"Who?" 

"The ones who want to leave." 

"Maybe she wants to come back." 

"Yeah, maybe you'll get lucky, " he said and turned to his next customer. 

"Yeah, " Danny said softly, paused, and walked away. 

* 

Tonight, she had off, so she'd spent the evening getting reacquainted with the city that had become both familiar and alien to her as the years passed. She knew the streets, knew them well, but she had found little comfort and refuge, save the number of friends from her apartment complex she could count on one hand. 

She'd been lucky to get a break as a bartender because the money had started coming in, started coming in steadily for once, and she had been able to afford still only a one bedroom, but one in Midtown Manhattan; she felt happy that for once something had gone her way. She had dug herself out of the dumps she'd been in over in Washington Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, both of which lived up to the reputation of crime in New York City. 

Once she'd found herself here in Manhattan, that image she'd always had in the back of her mind began to emerge and light started creeping in at the edges of the darkness she'd been trapped in since she'd come here years ago. Small light, of course, only tiny beams trickling in, but light nonetheless, light enough to give her hope. 

So tonight she'd gone out, thrown on a Brooklyn hoodie, pulled tight around her head against the rain, her faded jeans, and old sneakers, and walked the streets of Midtown. 

She stopped inside Morton's of Chicago on 5th Avenue for a bite, watched the people of wealth ease themselves into luxury and flaunt their monetary status as they displayed their worth on their fingers in jewelry and around their neck in expensive furs. They had a comfort she could only imagine and a greed she never wanted, but once, maybe, she thought she'd like to step inside Bloomingdales, Saks 5th Avenue, or even Prada, and walk out with something she could afford to say was hers. 

It grew later, coming on 1 a.m. in fact, and she watched the city continue to move, though less occupied and slightly quieter, less hectic and noisy. She walked past numerous payphones on a daily basis, happened to tonight, in fact, and sometimes, even now, she wondered what would happen if she'd just pick up the phone, just pick it up and hear her mother and say she wanted to go home. 

She didn't really no where home was anymore, didn't feel she belonged to anyone anymore, even herself. Only now was she settling into something she could only describe as the smallest degree of happiness, but there were by and large whole pieces to that perfection missing -- most especially...someone to love, someone to be in love with, someone to share herself with. 

The buildings merged together as she walked until she finally stopped in front of one government building -- the FBI, in fact. Not too large, but large enough to announce its presence and she wondered how it must feel to be a part of that in even the smallest degree, to know you were doing something of importance rather than getting people drunk and cleaning up after them when they chose to forget their inhibitions and forget to be polite and well-mannered and human, really, and leave all their filth for her to clean up in their hotel rooms. 

She dug her wet hands into her pockets, watched some lights go out and some remain on and wonder what they hovered over in the late hours of night, what case their frenzied mind worked to solve. She could only imagine some of the things they saw in there -- probably, she thought, some things she'd only seen in nightmares and they had to stare at photos of the atrocities humans were capable of inflicting upon each other. 

As she stood outside, an agent happened to walk out and she pulled her hood tighter in an unconscious reflex to hide herself. 

He noticed her and paused as he stood on the bottom step, stared at her a moment, unable to shake the familiarity of her face. He couldn't make it out completely, but her eyes looked like ones he'd seen once. 

"You okay, ma'am?" He asked. 

The rain masked her view, but behind the fog, she caught sight of his kind eyes and bit her tongue, resisting the urge to scream that she was anything but okay. 

Instead, she tightened the straps of the tiny backpack she had strapped to her back and nodded. 

"Just fine, " she said, feeling the lie burn as it slipped from her tongue. 

"Where you headed?" 

She shifted her pack, unsure why this man would be interested in anything she was doing. 

"Home -- Midtown." 

"By yourself?" 

"Every night." 

"It's late." 

"Says the guy just leaving work at one in the morning, " she spoke, a teasing lilt in her voice. She didn't know why, but she felt an ease with him. 

He shifted now, looked down the street. 

"Big case." 

"Good luck with it, " she replied, turning to leave and pausing to remark, "by the way, your collar's crooked. 

* 

The key slid in easily as she met her door. Her hand was numb from the steady rain outside and her body shook with bone weary coughs. 

The sound of footsteps drew her attention as she pushed her apartment door in, slinging her pack inside. It was her neighbor, jogging up the steps. She'd met him a month ago when she'd moved in and he'd been friendly and nice, quiet, but kind, and they'd grown to be friends in their own way. 

"Coming down with something?" He asked, turning the key in his lock as well. 

"Yeah, " she said, smiling, "sick of work." 

"Me too. But I got a new job." 

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah. I'll tell you over a bowl of chicken soup tonight after work -- my last night at that crummy place, " he said, smiling. 

"Oh, I wouldn't want to bother --" 

"No, no. It's no bother. I was going to make some soup anyway." 

She knew he wasn't, but she smiled. He had this innocence about him that made her think if she'd ever had siblings, he'd have been the younger brother she always wanted -- you just wanted to shove him under a blanket and keep all the monsters away; mostly, she wanted to because he had that look in his eyes that she once had and it was nice to see it again, nice to know it wasn't an illusion. 

"All right, well, thanks Ted." 

"Sure, Janet, see you soon." 

She cringed a little every time she heard it. She didn't know why she still did it, but it happened nonetheless. This time, she'd become Janet Leblanc. Janet for her mother and Leblanc -- Leblanc for that movie that had already immortalized her, the _Maltese Falcon_. No one, she thought, would give it a second thought, and this way, she could keep a part of her past with her in some way. 

She thought of the pain she'd endured over the years, what she'd been and done and the disillusionment she carried around of her own silly dreams. They had once seemed conceivable and now they seemed simply...like nothing more than dust. 

But sometimes, what hurt most was that she'd forgotten the sound of her own name. 

* 

"You need a picture of me?" 

Janet Spade eyed Jack warily, and even more so when he finished his request. 

"A picture of you when you were between twenty-five and thirty," Jack concluded. 

"That was a long time ago, Agent Malone." Mrs. Spade turned away, and Jack didn't miss the wistful tone that crept into her voice. "I'm not sure I understand." 

"Forensic artists can do amazing things, Mrs. Spade. Using a combination of Samantha's picture and yours, we can age her photograph..it'll give us a good idea of what she looks like now." 

Janet Spade bit her lip as tears stung her eyes. "What she looks like now..." A deep breath. "Okay. I think I have something that may work. Excuse me for a minute." 

Mrs. Spade disappeared up her home's narrow staircase, and Jack caught a glimpse of himself in the small mirror that hung above the fireplace. 

His collar, he noted, was perfectly in place, but glancing at it only reminded him of the young woman he'd seen the night before. Briefly, Jack tried to hold her in his memory, to turn the lilt of her voice and expression in her eyes over and draw out a conclusion, some reason for the familiarity that had washed over him as they spoke, but Janet Spade's descent back into the living room broke him out of his futile efforts. 

She looked at him shyly before wordlessly handing him a small, dusty photograph. He smiled his thanks as his eyes dropped to the picture. 

Poor quality couldn't rob the photo of its essence, of the quiet moment in time captured forever in a four-by-six inch prison. 

Janet Spade's eyes, as deep and dark as they remained so many years later, were without barriers at the time the picture was taken. She looked as though she had just raised them to the camera, and her mouth was curved in the beginning of a surprised smile. 

"Is that okay?" Mrs. Spade motioned to the photograph. "I was twenty-eight in that picture, but I may..I may have another, if that won't work..." 

"This is fine, Mrs. Spade," Jack assured her, standing with the picture in hand. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome." A quick smile, then her face grew serious. "I'd like...I'd like to see her, see her picture when it's finished, if that's allowed." 

Jack couldn't recall standard procedure for such a request, and at the moment, he didn't care. "Of course. I'll let you know." 

"Thank you. For everything," the woman clarified, as Jack stepped out the front door. "Two days ago, I didn't think I'd ever see my daughter again. You've brought me hope, Agent Malone." 

All Jack could manage was a smile and a slight nod, because how could he tell her that she brought him hope, too? What words could he form to say that searching for Samantha Spade, the one who had caught his attention and never let go, had reinstilled in him a sense of purpose and reason and drive? 

He couldn't, so he left Janet Spade behind and prayed that his actions would convey what his words never could. 

* 

"Table of Contents, huh?" Samantha had to smile at the eager expression on Ted's face. 

"Yeah, it's really great. Kind of vintage-like, you know? The hours aren't bad, either." 

Samantha nodded, idly stirring what was left of her soup. She couldn't help gazing out the window at the black city peppered with sporadic dots of light, and she tried to remember the last time she'd been as excited as Ted was now about...anything. 

"Janet?" 

She looked up automatically to find Ted gazing back at her curiously, and shook her head. 

"Sorry. What was that?" 

"Um, I said maybe you could come visit me sometime. You know, buy a good book..." He trailed off, leaving them in awkward silence for a brief moment until Samantha smiled. 

"Sure. Let me know when you get settled in, and I'll drop by." 

The relief in Ted's voice was apparent. "Yeah, great. I will." 

More of the lights around the city had gone out, Samantha noted, and she stood slowly. 

"I better go. Thanks for the soup, Ted, and congratulations on the job." 

He walked her quietly to the door. "No problem. See you soon, then." 

She felt his eyes on her back, watching her until she was enclosed safely in her own apartment, and she smiled, because even if it was just young, quiet Ted, Ted who had no trouble believing that her name was Janet LeBlanc and never questioned the brief stories she told him about her past, it was nice to know that someone, somewhere, cared. 

* 

"Viv? Yeah, it's Jack. Listen, I'm going to try something out here...I'm on my way to see Adam Gallagher...right, the artist. I want to see if he can age Samantha's picture, give us an idea of what she looks like now. Call Danny, will you? If it works, we'll need everyone to pick up an updated photo. Great. Thanks, Viv." 

Closing his phone, Jack continued down the quiet hallway of the FBI's forensic office. Ducking into a small, darkened room, he was greeted warmly by slender Adam Gallagher, a middle-aged man whose life had consisted entirely of photographs and forensics, and the combination of both. 

"Jack, hello. What can I do for you?" 

"Got a case I could use some help on. Girl skipped town when she was seventeen, and that was ten years ago. Her mom asked us to take her case a few days ago." 

Adam winced. "That's tough. Those for me?" The artist pointed to the two photographs Jack clutched in his right hand. 

"Yeah, this one's the girl at seventeen," Jack handed him Samantha's picture, "and her mom at twenty-eight." 

Adam studied the two photos for a moment before nodding. "Sure, I think we can work with these. Let me just load them into the computer." 

Soon after, Samantha's face popped up on the screen. 

"Since she's seventeen, her face is almost completely mature already," Adam explained to Jack as he made some quick changes. "We'll just slightly elongate a few features. Her eyes won't change," he clarified before typing a command into the computer. Janet Spade's photograph appeared onscreen next to Samantha's. 

"Using her mother's features, we can fill in the rest," Adam said, and with a few more keystrokes, the picture was finished. 

Jack couldn't speak. 

The face was fuller, the skin darker, the expression more relaxed, but he knew without a doubt that the woman staring back at him was the same woman he'd seen the night before. 

Samantha Spade. 

It had been dark, and their meeting brief, but he knew. 

He knew because her eyes had haunted him from the moment he saw her...from the first time he ever saw her picture..and as he gazed at the image staring back at him from the computer, he knew Adam Gallagher was right. 

Her eyes hadn't changed. 

* 

TBC... 


	4. Part 4

**A/N**: To all our reviewers, thank you so much. And our contingent over on Maple Street: you guys rock! 

* 

They had fallen into a routine, a comfort zone; they had fallen into this idea that they both had a ring on their finger and two beautiful children and maybe those things, those things alone, were all that was needed to keep them together. 

He hadn't thought about it years ago, hadn't thought about the consequences of his work and her work and their own distance before they started; the distance that only grew as the years passed. 

So they had fallen into this routine and tonight, as he loosened his tie, dropped his bag onto the floor, and walked past her lazy body sprawled in a skimpy nightgown he'd once found attractive, he knew what had happened: he had stopped loving her; stopped loving her in all the ways he was supposed to love her, all the ways she probably deserved to be loved, and he caught her tired eyes as she looked up at him from her position and knew -- knew she had stopped loving him as well. 

They had never said the words. 

"This has got to stop, Jack, " she murmured, turning her attention back to CNN. 

"Big case, Maria, got a lot of avenues to explore, it takes time --" 

"I know you take your cases to heart, Jack, but this is ridiculous." 

"This one's different, " he spoke, throwing his tie onto their bed. 

He ran a hand over the sheets on his side of the bed, realized they no longer felt comforting, no longer welcomed him into a peaceful sleep. It felt alien to him. 

"We're not working, Jack." 

He sighed, watched his ring slide loosely around his finger, ready to fall off with a simple nudge. 

"I know." 

He always had. 

"We separated and you came back and -- and you didn't come back, Jack." 

"Marriage is two-sided, Maria." 

She ran a hand through her hair, closed her outer robe tightly around her body. 

"I know, Jack. That's why we need to stop kidding ourselves here. We need to think about where we're going. I think --" 

He waved a hand, cutting her off. 

"I think I should leave tonight, I'll get a room somewhere. I'm tired, I need to sleep. I can't do this right now." 

"We can't run away from this. We've been doing that for too long, Jack." 

"I know, " he said. 

He gathered some clothes together, stuffed them hastily into a duffel bag, and nodded a goodbye. He had run through this scenario in his mind before and somehow, that preparation never really prepared you when it came down to it. He wondered if he should feel a sadness for what he knew lay ahead -- if he should regret anything. 

And when it didn't hurt to leave that bedroom, to leave her for what would probably be forever, he knew it had been over long ago. 

* 

"Danny, I want you in Brooklyn Heights checking out some of the bars, figure out where she was working. I'm heading into Midtown, find out where she's at now." 

"Why do you think she's in Midtown?" Martin asked as he took the photograph from Jack he was passing around the table. 

"I saw a girl the other night who matches this picture we made yesterday. Said she lived in Midtown. I want Danny in Brooklyn Heights so we can get a better background on her, get a clue where she might be working. There's plenty of bars in Midtown, she could be in any of them." 

"Martin, Kathy, I want you two banging on doors in the apartment buildings from here 69th, shove her picture in every tenants' face if you have to." 

"Viv, you're with me." 

The team collectively stood, fueled even further by their newly developed pictures of her that they hoped would bring them closer to her. 

* 

"Yeah? Yeah. All right, Danny, we're on it. Thanks, " Jack spoke, closing his cell phone as he ended his conversation. The heat on 55th Ave. seemed to build all around him and he desperately wished he could afford himself the luxury of at least removing his tie. 

May 7 and the heat was already bouncing off the buildings and encasing the city like a furnace. He wiped his brow with his finger. 

May 7 and the heat was bringing him down to hell with it. 

"That was Danny -- got a hold of her former employer, said she's working at O'Neill's Irish Pub on 46th, far as he knew. Let's check it out." 

Vivian nodded, following Jack as he did a turnaround on the street. 

"So you saw this girl?" 

He took a deep breath. 

"I'm pretty sure I did." 

She knew that look in his eyes and continued before he could trap himself, "It's not your fault. You didn't catch her right then -- it's not your fault. It was dark, raining." 

"I should've known, Viv. I should've known her face well enough without that picture, should've been able to pick her out of a crowd. She was right there -- right there and she just slipped away." 

"Well, at least we know she's in the city, Jack. We know she's in Midtown. We're a hell of a lot closer than we were two days ago, that's progress." 

"That's luck." 

"Some might call it fate." 

"What?" 

"Fate. Funny, don't you think? You were walking out at just the exact moment she was walking by? Stuff like that doesn't just happen. We're meant to find her -- and we will." 

He looked at her for a moment, digesting his words, interrupted then by her voice again. 

"Well, we're here, " Vivian waved, indicating the Pub. 

"We are, " he replied, pulling his hands out from his pockets, opening the door and waiting for the smoke to clear before he walked in. He could feel her when he walked in. He heard the door close behind him, some pool tables clink in the back, and followed Vivian to the bar, pulling out the photo of Samantha as they neared the bartender. 

* 

"Remember those two girls upstate that were kidnapped and killed?" 

"Who?" 

"You know -- uh, Annie Miller and uh, Siobahn...geez, I don't remember her last name. I think it was Italian. Anyway, remember them?" Ted asked over his coffee. 

"Yeah. What about them?" Samantha responded, spooning some sugar into her mug and lifting it to her mouth as she sipped the hot liquid carefully. 

"I heard they're dedicating, like, this park in their memory or something. I only thought of it because my grandparents used to live in that town -- I spent a couple of summers there. It was so safe, I would've never guessed something like that could happen." 

"No, we never do, " she replied absently, her mind drifting to the news ticker she'd seen on the two girls months ago. She remembered being sad and wondering how that loss must've felt to the parents and the police involved, the ones who had devoted themselves to finding them, the ones who couldn't. 

She couldn't fathom a loss like that, a loss of that kind. 

"So, first day, huh? You nervous?" 

"Nah, it's going to be great. My boss is nice. Says I did such a good job interning he's gonna let me run it by myself during the afternoons." 

"Wow, Ted, that's an honor. Pay's better too, right?" 

"Yeah, stepping up." 

"Good for you, nice to see one of us is, " she spoke, standing the dump her remaining coffee down the sink. 

Ted stood as well, doing the same. 

"You'll get there, Janet." 

"Yeah, " she replied, absently, looking away for a moment. She turned back to him and smiled, enveloping him in a hug. 

"You better get going, don't want to be late on your first day. You got a lunch break?" 

He nodded, pulling away shyly from her embrace. 

"I'll get you and we can check out that new deli down the street." 

He smiled, waved goodbye, and the silence hit her instantly. She was glad for the friendship, glad for this life she had started constructing, but lost without the comfort of her own identity, of being who she'd always wanted to be. 

She thought of the man she'd seen the other night, the man who had been so kind, who had taken the time to look at her as though she mattered, as though she deserved to be more than she had become. She wanted to know him and wished she hadn't left. She seemed to find herself in what she did best: running away. 

* 

He removed his glasses in frustration, clutching the phone casually as his wife's disenchanted voice reprimanded him once again for his late nights, his absence from family dinner, and his general disregard for the scattered pieces of their nonexistent marriage. 

He could hear it coming in her voice, could hear it in the disapproval of her verbal lecture. 

He could hear the cold woman she had become and wondered how long they had been this way, how he had let it get this bad. 

So he knew before she spoke what she was going to say. 

"Jack, " she sighed, "it's over." 

And this time...it really was. 

* 

Martin knew the man's answer from the blank expression on his face, knew they would have to endure another "no" even before he shook his head and shrugged. 

"Sorry. Never seen her before. Wish I could be more help." 

The apartment owner closed his door with a firm, decisive click, and Martin shook his head in frustration. 

He and Kathleen had been canvassing apartments all morning, and the most they'd gotten were polite shakes of the head and wishes of good luck. 

Even Kathleen's rookie optimism appeared to be slightly wilting, though she threw him a game smile as they walked back into the early May heat. 

She understood, and he understood, and they both knew that through all the dead-ends, the hopelessness, the frustration, they would push on. 

It was the job, and more importantly, it was someone's daughter, someone's friend, someone's hope..someone's last chance. 

* 

_Fate..._

Vivian's words played of their own accord through his spinning mind. What was fate, anyway? He vaguely remembered hearing the word on his wedding day.. 

"..they make such a beautiful couple, it must be fate.." 

He wondered if fate was supposed to fade, to vanish, to disappear. 

Somehow, he didn't think so. 

The ring remained on his finger, because he wasn't quite ready, wasn't prepared yet for Vivian's blunt questions or the quiet raise of Danny's eyebrows or the chill he knew would accompany the sudden absence of the warm metal. 

So he avoided it, and concentrated on her. On what may have been fate, or luck, or progress, or a strange combination of the three. 

* 

"Sure, that's Janet Leblanc. Only she doesn't work here anymore. Quit about two months ago." The bartender nodded firmly before handing the photograph back to Jack. 

"Janet Leblanc? Are you sure?" Vivian persisted. 

"Of course." 

"Must have changed her name," Jack mused quietly to Vivian. Janet Leblanc. It made sense. 

"Why did she quit?" Jack turned his attention back to the man behind the bar of O'Neill's Irish Pub. He flipped a glass into place before shrugging. 

"Better pay somewhere else, I guess. She mentioned something about Ganley's over on 68th. Oh, and I think she cleans hotel rooms during the day." The bartender shook his head. "I got the feeling she didn't like staying in one place for too long, you know?" 

He knew. 

"Do you have any idea where she lives, or what hotels she works for?" Vivian's tone was expectant, but the man offered only another shrug. 

"Sorry. I hired her on the spot, and she kept to herself most of the time. Didn't really learn much about her." 

Once again, she hovered just out of his grasp. He was a step, a day, a week too late, and unsure of how to catch up. 

But he would. 

It was fate. 

* 

"Sorry," a breathless Ted apologized as he took the seat across from Samantha in the bustling deli. "We got really busy, and I couldn't leave.." 

"It's okay," she assured him with an amused half-grin. "I've only been here for about ten minutes." 

She watched relief cross his face, and initiated a conversation about his first day. As he eagerly relayed the events, Samantha allowed part of her mind to wander, to wonder about the people eating, moving, talking around them. 

She did that often; let herself create idle stories about where they came from, where they were, where they were going and what they might face along the way. 

It was, she understood, probably a mode of dissociation, of distancing herself from her surroundings and her own story. 

She did it anyway. 

So when she casually shifted her gaze from the table to her right to the deli's large glass window, she wasn't prepared to recognize the man quietly passing by. 

Tall and broad, dark-haired and solemn, she knew his face and she knew his walk. 

She knew him. 

It wasn't raining, it wasn't nighttime, and he was now accompanied by a shorter, dark-skinned woman, but she couldn't shake the feeling that settled over her. 

As he stepped out of view and she tried to turn her attention back to Ted, she couldn't stop wondering. 

She wondered about the case he was on. 

She wondered about his name. 

She wondered if he would believe her if she told him her name was Janet Leblanc. 

She wondered if she would ever get to tell him her name, her real one, because somehow, she knew she wouldn't be able to tell him anything else. 

She wondered why she wondered so hard about the man with the crooked collar who'd smiled at her through the rain. 

* 

"You okay?" Vivian squinted against the brilliant sun, peering up at him as they continued their walk to Ganley's Pub. 

"Yeah, I'm fine." Jack offered her a quick smile, one that he knew she only pretended to be satisfied with. 

Vivian nodded, retrieving her cell phone from her belt. 

"Hey, Martin. Yeah, we hit a dead end too, but the owner of O'Neill's did tell us that he thinks Samantha cleans hotel rooms in the mornings. You and Kathleen start with hotels within a three mile radius of O'Neill's, find out if she's currently employed at any of them, or if she ever was. Tell Danny to work on the other hotels in Midtown. We're on our way to Ganley's--O'Neill's owner said she might be working there. Oh, and use the name Janet Leblanc. We're pretty sure she changed it. Great, thanks Martin." 

Jack dropped his hands to his pockets and raised his face to the sky before turning back to Vivian. 

"There must be a million hotels in Midtown," she observed. 

"We're going to find her, Viv." At her questioning expression, he shrugged. "Fate, remember?" 

In his left pocket, the ring slipped from his finger. 

* 

Gold was the color of power and wealth and superficial beauty. It wasn't a very strong metal, rather valued for its shiny exterior, the skin it wore that bounced off sunshine and lamps and tears, anything that could take in beauty and reflect back anything but. 

Gold was the color of his wedding ring. 

Silver was the color everyone overlooked; it got pushed aside and forgotten, cringed at when won in tournaments, smiled at with lies when handed off as a gift; lost...lost. Silver was the color of everything that had once existed and wanted to be once again. 

Silver was the color of his St. Jude medal and he found it fitting somehow that the color and the Saint had found each other. He found it fitting that he held it now as he no longer held his ring. 

The medal was old, perhaps smudged in its own way from years of prayer. He wondered at the whispers it had heard in its lifetime. His fingers traced the outline of it, the figure of St. Jude with his cane, his name, the beads that chained him to something tangible and made certain it could be worn always for those who needed it. 

St. Jude belonged to the ones who had been forgotten and lost and fallen between whispers and shadows and the sunshine that had turned its back on them. 

St. Jude belonged to the ones who watched their tears fall in silence, the ones who'd forgotten their own faces. 

St. Jude belonged to memory. 

Silver, St. Jude, Samantha Spade...and...and Jack Malone. 

They all fell together in time. 

* 

"Oh sure, Janet works here. Good kid, knows her stuff. Get a lot of compliments on her drinks. She makes a good martini, grasshopper, you know, the usual. Her speciality's the Metropolitan, and uh, Mudslide. Yeah, good kid. Lots of tips." 

Jack put the picture back into his coat with care. 

"Got any idea where she's living?" 

He shrugged. Seemed the attitude was, 'If you don't tell me, I don't care.' 

"Probably nearby. She doesn't have a car, walks as far as I know. I doubt she's livin' in Battery Park and takin' a bus or subway everyday...nah, not her style. She's not dirt poor, but she's not exactly comfortable, not the type to spend money on transportation if she can walk." 

"Right. Anything else you can tell us?" 

He scratched his head, flinging the bar towel over his shoulder. 

"Not at the moment, but if I think of anything, you've got my call." 

* 

"I got something, something good, " Danny spoke, breezing into the bullpen. He slid some files across the conference table. 

"Tracked down a Janet Leblanc at the Park Central Hotel on 55th. Right across from Carnegie Hall. You've got Rockefeller Center and Times Square in walking distance." 

"Something a person who's always wanted to live in New York would want to be near." 

"Right. And -- there's more, " he continued, holding a finger up as he thumbed through the folder and pulled out some pictures. 

"I got a hold of some surveillance videos, had the tech print me some pictures while you and Viv were at Ganley's." 

Danny spread out the five black and white pictures on the conference table. They were slightly grainy, but had been zoomed in and touched up just enough and in the right spots to give them what they needed. 

"That's our girl, " Danny pointed to Samantha's face consecutively in each picture. 

Jack took one and studied it closely. 

"Classy hotel." 

"Not bad -- three and a half stars. Stylish. Manager says she works the graveyard Tuesday, Thursday, and every other weekend." 

"Good pay?" 

"With a bartending job on the side? I'd say she's stepping up. It's not the best, but it's better than what she was doing as a waitress in Brooklyn." 

"All right, give Martin a call, tell him I want him and Kathy to continue canvassing the apartments around that vicinity, up to the Upper East Side. Viv and I will start further down near 53rd. Danny, I want you to get in touch with the mother, tell her what we've got and to come into the city. We're zeroing in on Samantha and she needs to be here." 

He nodded and shuffled the pictures back into the folder, set it on his desk, and went about his duties. 

Jack got Vivian's attention and motioned her out of the building. 

* 

"Most of these apartments are way out of her price range, Jack." 

"We're only on 52nd, there's plenty around here that she could afford. I don't think she cares much about the little luxuries." 

"Can't afford the little luxuries." 

"Exactly." 

His phone rang and he flipped it open, continuing to walk. 

"Yeah. Yeah. All right, Martin, thanks." 

Vivian raised her eyebrows in question. 

"Martin found an apartment near Central Park -- Janet Leblanc lived there until about a month ago. Tenant says she was looking at one around 45th. We're almost there." 

"There's no 'almost there' in this heat, Jack." 

He shot her a smirk. 

"It was a cheap apartment, this one's a little more expensive. Better neighborhood." 

She's getting there, he thought. 

In her own way. 

* 

"Excuse me, I'm Agent Jack Malone, this is Agent Vivian Johnson, we're with the FBI. Can you give us any information about a tenant of yours -- goes by the name Janet Leblanc?" 

The landlord, unsurprisingly, looked frustrated at this request, and turned around to the hallway he'd just come from. 

"Excuse me, did you say Janet Leblanc?" 

Jack looked over his shoulder at the young man who'd asked him the question. 

"You would be?" 

"Her neighbor -- friend...good friend. Uh, is she in some kind of trouble?" 

Vivian turned around, sharing a brief glance with Jack before she asked, "Not trouble, but we are looking for her. Is she in the building?" 

"Just went out for the night. What's this about?" 

"Do you know where she went?" 

"No, she just likes to walk around, sometimes she'll go see a movie if she's got the movie. She's usually gone for hours, doesn't get back until late. She'll be around tomorrow, though, she's coming to the bookstore I work at." 

Vivian took over the conversation with Ted and dealt with the landlord as Jack moved to the side, pulling out his cellphone to communicate what they'd just learned with the rest of his team. 

He turned back to Ted and Vivian. 

"Now, uh..." 

"Ted." 

"Ted. We're going to need to ask you some questions." 

* 

TBC... 


	5. Part 5

**A/N**: A big, heaping thank you to everyone at Maple Street! We appreciate the feedback so much! 

* 

"I don't understand." A bewildered Ted led Jack and Vivian into his apartment, motioning to his modest furniture before taking a seat opposite the agents. "Why are you asking about Janet?" 

Vivian and Jack exchanged glances. 

"Ten years ago, Samantha Spade left home, moved to New York City and changed her name to Janet Leblanc. Samantha Spade and Janet are the same woman," Vivian told him, blunt words softened by her gentle tone. 

Disbelief crossed Ted's features, and at his skeptical look, Jack handed him two photographs. 

"That's Samantha at seventeen, and that's a computer generated picture of Samantha now." 

Color drained from his face. "She lied," Ted whispered after a moment, and in his voice Jack detected only hurt, no anger or resentment. 

"She lied because she thought she had to," Jack told him firmly, and the younger man nodded slightly. 

"Samantha.." Ted tested the name for the first time, and crossed his arms over his chest. "If it's been ten years, why are you looking for her now?" 

"Her mother brought her case to us," was Jack's response. "She's looking for answers." 

"Who isn't?" Ted observed quietly. "I'd like to help, but I've told you all I know. I have no idea where she is at the moment, and I don't know when she'll be back." 

"Okay. Can you tell us which apartment is Samantha's?" 

"Right across the hall," Ted answered, dropping his eyes to the pictures once more before handing them to Jack. 

"Like I said, she'll be at Table of Contents tomorrow afternoon." 

"Thank you." Vivian offered a warm smile as the two stood and left Ted's apartment. 

"Poor kid," she mused as the door closed behind them. "That's some heavy news." 

"He'll be alright." Jack was preoccupied with Samantha's door; closed, heavy, and wooden, it was still a barrier, but he was finding it hard to believe that they were so close. Her personal space, where she ate and slept and sometimes sat by the window just watching the city..it was all only two feet from him. 

Vivian checked her watch. "It's late, Jack. We should call it a night, head over to Table of Contents tomorrow. There's no telling what time she'll get back." 

Jack didn't want to call it a night, wanted to sit in front of Samantha Spade's door until her return or search the gridwork of blocks she was wandering at this moment, but he knew Vivian was right. 

A final, fleeting glance at her door was all he allowed himself as he turned and slowly followed Vivian down the narrow hallway. 

He could hold on until tomorrow. 

* 

"Sydney Harrison. Grabbed in the elevator on her way into work this morning." 

Jack looked up sharply as Van Doren entered his office, spouting facts and tossing a file on his desk. He raised a hand to slow her. 

"We're still on the Spade case," Jack reminded his boss, gesturing to the papers spread in front of him. 

"No, Jack. Sydney Harrison's abduction takes precedent over a ten-year old case." Van Doren's firm tone left no room for argument, but Jack couldn't stop himself. 

"We are this close to closing her case. All I need is the rest of the day. Her mother's waited ten years, Paula. I can't bring her within arms reach only to pull her away." 

"Sydney Harrison, Jack. Now. Samantha Spade isn't going anywhere." 

She may be, was his desperate thought as Van Doren left him with Sydney Harrison's file. 

* 

Breaking the news to the team wasn't half as hard as this was going to be, Jack knew, approaching the silent Janet Spade. 

She sat in a hard plastic chair, eyes down and unfocused, gripping her purse fiercely. As he approached, she looked up, and a tremulous smile crossed her face. 

"Is she here? Are you going to bring her here now?" 

Jack closed his eyes briefly before shaking his head. He bent to Janet Spade's level and forced himself to hold her questioning, hopeful gaze. 

"Mrs. Spade, we've had to put Samantha's case on hold. A woman was abducted this morning, and we've been instructed to concentrate on her whereabouts." 

The older woman looked at him with glassy, round eyes and a perplexed expression on her face, and Jack noticed that her hands had begun to shake. 

"I don't..I don't understand. What about Samantha?" 

"We're going to find her, Mrs. Spade. We are. I'm so sorry it won't be today." 

Jack wanted her to hit him, to yell and spew obscenities, because anything would have hurt less than the quietly broken nod she offered, a subtle drop of her head that screamed of resigned acceptance and a lifetime of disappointment. 

* 

Vivian had taken Samantha's picture down from the board and replaced it with Sydney Harrison's, Jack noted with a mixture of bitterness and relief. He, at least, would not have to perform the final act of giving up, of allowing her to remain, for the moment, wandering and lost. 

So he sat and tried to concentrate on Sydney Harrison, because she, like Samantha, deserved to be found. 

Danny and Martin were on the way to search Sydney's house, while Kathleen and Vivian spoke with Libby Coulter, Sydney's assistant. 

That left Jack to respond to her partner when he received an email asking for $687,000 in return for Sydney's life. 

It was a little over two hours later that Martin informed him of the location for the ransom drop. 

Table of Contents. 

* 

He had sent Danny in and he had weighed the outcomes as he balanced the decision in his hands. It was never easy to point the finger at an agent under your command and shuffle them off to a duty you couldn't be sure would guarantee their safe return. But when the decision came, he had picked Danny and he had been confident in that conviction. 

He watched with binoculars as they moved around the store, waited for the inevitable. 

He hadn't told Ted and he didn't know why, but in the chaos, he supposed, the frenzy to secure the drop and prepare everything, the young man whose trust in a woman he'd considered a friend had been broken, a woman Jack hoped he wouldn't see through his binoculars, a woman he'd passed by in mere inches more often, he supposed, in the last few days than he knew -- that young man hadn't been foremost and he figured surprise was for the best. 

Why alarm him if there was nothing to alarm him about? 

But when he reminded Libby she'd forgotten her bag and the nervous woman faltered and blinked and probably hoped Danny would usher her out and smile and assure her nothing was wrong and she'd be home by dinner tonight, Jack knew what he'd been expecting had been exactly what happened. 

He blinked in frustration and upset; the task of negotiating a hostage situation suddenly wearing on his mind before it began. Years of training had prepared him, years of the real thing, even, and he could run through the tactical aspects of the negotiation in his sleep, but the people always changed; the people were what defined any situation. 

And when he brought his binoculars up for one last look before the blinds were closed tightly by the lunatic with a gun against prying Federal eyes, Jack caught a close-up glimpse of the one face that he'd been hoping he wouldn't see. 

But in that moment, he had his purpose. 

He had seen Samantha Spade. 

* 

"Agent Taylor's in there?" 

Jack nodded as he cradled the phone, covering the mouthpiece with one hand as he listened to the repitious ringing on the other end. 

"Agent Taylor and about half a dozen hostages." 

He fumbled for the words. 

"And Samantha Spade." 

Her gaze flickered and hardened. 

"Samantha Spade? Jack --" 

"Let me do this, Paula. I've got Danny in there and Samantha -- I've been working this case for too long. Let me fix this, let me find Sydney Harrison, let me get Samantha back." 

She hesitated for a moment, prepared to argue, until she met the resolve in his eyes and nodded cautiously. 

The ringing stopped and a voice answered and he felt the way you feel when you get on a roller coaster, strap in, the ride starts, and you know you're in too far to leave. You can't walk away. 

* 

You take your victories, no matter how small, whenever you can get them. When the boy and his mother left the store under a tent of S.W.A.T. officers, Jack took the victory and swallowed it, let it linger in his mouth before pushing it aside and focusing on the broader task at hand and that was securing the release of all the hostages. 

He watched Martin speak to the mother, ask her questions about Barry and his mental state, how fragile and loose and quick to anger he was. When she spoke of his attitude, of his gun and the way he waved it around without thought of where the bullets it deceptively hid in its barrel could land, Jack cringed at the possibilities. He didn't want to think where one of those bullets could go, didn't want to think of the name it could erase from the whiteboard as Martin looked at Jack and held his gaze, uncapped the marker, and wrote 'Samantha Spade' on a whiteboard for the second time in less than a week. 

She had come alive only to be a name once again. 

* 

She sat near Ted and tried to decipher the thoughts behind his fear. He wasn't looking at her like he usually did, and though circumstances would certainly call for a change in demeanor, she knew something had happened to him before he'd come to work today and she wished she could ask him about it. 

If only because she couldn't count on seeing him alive on the outside. 

They had exchanged names and Ted had looked at her strangely then too, so had the cute guy in the hoodie who'd walked in with Libby -- Danny, she remembered. That was his name -- Danny. It rolled off her tongue easily and she caught something in his face as well she couldn't understand -- like he knew her. 

Like it went beyond that -- like they could've been good friends once, once in a different life perhaps, a different time with different circumstances. She liked the way the name felt and thought maybe if they walked from this she could call him by his name and he could say hers and they could meet beyond the circumstances that had brought them here today and become friends -- the kind of friend she'd only recently found in Ted. 

The kind of friend you waited your whole life for. She felt a connection to Danny and wondered about his past -- wondered what had shaped him and where he'd been and if he'd ever lost himself once. 

Danny started speaking about the Twin Towers and Samantha's gut twisted. She remembered where she'd been and it bothered her still, bothered her always. She could see the nightmare in her sleep. 

They took turns describing how it had affected them and she wasn't sure she wanted to describe what she'd seen, but she spoke anyway. 

"I -- I got there when the second plane hit. And I saw them -- people falling. Just -- just falling. I ran before they came down -- I - I didn't know what to do, I just...I just..., " she paused, her voice cracking, "I just ran..." 

Ted's face fell in sympathy and Danny smiled sadly in support. She listened as Barry spoke of his wife and his loss and the tear fell unbidden down her cheek and she let it fall and fall...and fall. 

Seemed things were always falling. 

She wondered about Danny and the man she had met that rainy night and how they all fit together and why they had all found each other in the ways they had -- what was meant by the meetings and what they needed to know about each other. She wondered how things would've been different if she hadn't left that night. But she couldn't digress a fate she had fallen into so completely, and only hoped she could find herself when she left this place. She had been gone for far too long, she thought...far too long to even exist. 

She had built her dreams once -- she had built them as castles in the air. 

She had kept a secret place in her heart for her dreams to go and she had forgotten to live. 

* 

With each ring that went unanswered, Jack's heart hammered a little harder and the air in the room grew heavier. 

It wasn't Van Doren's weighted stare or the fact that Martin and Kathleen hung onto his every word and movement. 

It was that responsibility for the lives of Samantha Spade, Danny Taylor, Sydney Harrison and others fell squarely on his shoulders and on the fragile line of wire connecting him to the one man who held their fate in his unsteady hands. 

"Who's this?" 

"Jack Malone, Barry. The mother and her son, thank you for that." 

"Yeah. I'm still waiting on my helicopter, Jack." 

"We're working on it. These things, they take time. Meanwhile, do you need anything else? Food, water?" 

"Just my helicopter. Soon." 

The line went dead. 

* 

Samantha's eyes were trained not on Barry Mashburn but on the black phone he gripped in his right hand. It was her anchor, the voice on the other end her lifeline. She looked at Danny, who was intently focused on the one-sided interaction. They all were, silent, leaning forward, riding the fragile wave of hope, but the look on Danny's face held a subtle difference. He appeared to be processing, weighing Barry's clipped words against what may have been said on the other end. 

Samantha wondered too, wondered what kind of magic the mystery voice had worked so that Cheryl and Kyle were granted precious freedom from this sweltering prison. 

Ted was looking at her, glancing from Barry to her face and back again, and it unnerved her. She tried to question him with her eyes, but his face was unreadable. 

As Barry hung up the phone, her heart dropped. The sudden click and dead silence that followed again marked the end of their only connection to the world that somehow continued turning even as they sat, captive and still, together but so alone. 

* 

He had to try again. Jack didn't know yet how far he could push this man, didn't know his limits or much about him at all, but he knew Danny and, in a strange, deep way, he knew Samantha, and that was enough. 

"Hello?" 

"Barry? It's Jack." 

"I told you, I want my helicopter. That's it." 

"I know, Barry. I know. We're getting everything together. The thing is, people might work quicker if you let someone else go or gave us Sydney's location. We're doing everything we can here, but that kind of news, it could give people a jump, you know? Get them moving." 

"I just gave you two people, Jack. Two." 

"I know. I'm not going to forget that, Barry. I just think it might be best for all of us if you let someone else go." 

"I want my helicopter. You're not getting anything until I know for sure it's coming." 

Barry dropped the phone onto its hook, and without a second's hesitation, Jack dialed again. 

* 

The phone began to trill, and Samantha's breath caught in her throat as she saw Barry's head swing wildly toward it. 

"I _told_ him.." the man raged under his breath, and then his eyes met hers before she could look away. 

"You. Answer the phone. Tell him if he doesn't have my helicopter, I don't want to talk to him. And..and that I'm crazy, and I'm going to start shooting if I don't get it soon." 

Blood pounded in her ears so hard she could barely make out his request or what followed, only an emphatic "Do it!" that drove her from her seat on the floor to the counter, her shaking hand poised over the telephone. 

"Hello?" 

* 

The frightened female voice sounded so far away, and yet, there was something familiar about it. Libby Coulter, Jack thought at first, but no, the lilt, the quiet timbre..this was.. 

"Who am I speaking to?" He kept his own voice quiet, soothing, hoping to erase some of the woman's fear. 

* 

'Samantha Spade' was poised to fall from her lips, and she didn't know why. It had been so long, so long since she'd heard the name spoken or said it herself, and yet it almost choked her to reply to the man on the other end. 

"This is Janet Leblanc." 

* 

This was Samantha Spade. Van Doren's head shot up and her eyes caught his and he knew, knew he had a task and a duty to protect and serve, and yet all he wanted was to walk into that bookstore and walk out with her. 

"Um, Barry says..Barry says he's crazy and if he doesn't get his helicopter, he's going to start shooting." 

"Okay. I'm Agent Jack Malone. Listen closely, alright? Libby, Danny, Fran and Ted. The other man, is there any way you can tell me his name?" 

* 

Samantha swallowed hard, looked at Barry who was watching her intently, and Richard, who was moving quietly, slowly, along the floor. Danny, it seemed, was trying to watch both her and Richard, and Ted, Fran and Libby sat as still as they had before. 

She was on her own. 

"He's crazy, he really is. Richard--no, Barry..oh, damn it, I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm just so scared and I can't think and Barry, he says he's going to start shooting.." 

"Richard. Got it. Thank you." 

Richard had stopped his movement for the moment and Barry was glaring at her. 

"He wants his helicopter," were her next words, her voice almost shaking in relief. "He wants his helicopter and we all really want to get out of here, okay?" It was a quiet plea. 

"You did good," Jack told her softly. "Tell him the next time I call, I need to speak to him. We're going to get you out of there." 

Even amidst his sincere promise, Barry's heavy stare and the weighted silence that took over as she replaced the receiver, Samantha had time to realize that Jack had never once called her by name. 

* 

TBC... 


	6. Part 6

**A/N**: Well, we've come to the end, and wow, you guys are just so great, we appreciate the feedback so much, words can't express. Enjoy this last part! 

* 

Once you heard it, you never forgot the sound it made; a gun being fired, fired into the air, the trees, animals for sport, or people, even, because there was always evil enough for that. Once you heard that pop and the way it echoed off the ground and the sky, bounced through Heaven and down to Hell and you thought for a moment it might hit you, you never forgot how it sounded when it was shot off and when it landed and the echo whispered for a rescue. 

He'd heard it in the jungles of Vietnam, in the firing ranges at Quantico, in the streets and alleys, the quiet homes no one expected would ever shatter like everything else, in the darkest shadows of humanity, and in the places where memories became ghosts. 

So when he heard the shot through the phone, he thought of every place he'd once heard that same sound and every face he'd once seen on the receiving end of that deadly lead and said a prayer for whoever met the end of it this time. 

"Ma'am?" He spoke, hoping Samantha would hear him over the shouts he heard in the background. 

"Miss Leblanc?" He pressed on, more urgently this time. 

In certain situations, you remembered routines foremost, because you'd been through the process and it was familiar; the only things you'd have to adapt to were the circumstances, and objectivity was always the biggest concern. You wanted to help strangers, but you'd bleed for the ones you knew, the ones you cared about, the ones whose own lives sustained yours. 

So he'd been functioning on procedure until now, on the familiar process of hostage negotiation and it had worked well, always did until it was twisted -- and when that gun fired off, he stopped acting on what he'd once known and started acting on emotion, on instinct, on the feelings you're supposed to turn off when you're talking to a voice carrying a gun on the other line. 

He hadn't meant for it to happen, but the adrenaline, the need to know who'd been hurt, what had happened, everything that was going on, overrode all other thoughts and he pressed once more to the voice on the other line. 

In a frantic, urgent tone, he spoke the words he hadn't meant to say until he'd seen her on the other side. 

"Samantha?" 

* 

The phone rang again and she flinched as Barry fumbled angry words around the otherwise silent little store she remembered as being safe and quaint and dreamy in Ted's depictions merely days ago. Funny, she thought, how things could change so fast you couldn't decipher one moment from the next. 

She hoped he wouldn't make her get up again, as she felt safe in her new position against the small table in the middle of the room; close to the back of the store, close to the front...she was perfectly positioned in the middle, as though she could escape what was to come. 

Danny crossed his arms around his knees in front of her, occasionally supplying her with what she guessed was his best reassurance that they would be okay. Barry finally picked up the phone, gun waving unconsciously in wild motions as he spoke to Jack Malone. 

_Jack..._

She liked the name. Liked his voice; deep and laced with a rough exterior, but soothing as well...gentle and quiet and filled with promise. 

She watched what happened next unfold like something from a grainy black and white movie in slow motion as the slide projector ate away at the film. It seemed too fuzzy to be really happening, but here it was. 

Richard, to her right, moved toward something beneath a chair, something she soon saw to be a gun, which he quietly brought in front of himself. Danny caught the action quickly and his face fell slightly as he rotated his head to meet Barry Mashburn's whose attention had previously been to the closed blinds on the door. 

Hearing the motion, he turned away as Richard was moving towards him and Danny jumped up almost innately, as though he'd been prepared for something like this all along, and threw himself between the two men as they both raised their guns. 

He tackled Barry to the ground and Richard rolled away and for a moment, you couldn't tell one face from the next until you heard the shot. 

The room stilled and you could hear each heartbeat like a bass drum, feel your own pounding a steady, heavy rhythm against your chest in fear and later, relief that you had been spared. It always felt strange to count yourself lucky that you had lived while others died, but you felt it anyway, and Samantha prayed she wasn't luckier than anyone else in the bookstore today. 

She only knew when his arm wrapped around her that she wouldn't be the only one walking from this; she only really knew that if she heard Jack Malone's voice once more everything would be all right. 

Ted gently pulled her towards him, and she noticed for the first time that no one had been hurt and the bullet had embedded itself in the wall behind the cash register. Danny pulled Barry up along with himself as they both stood. The heat really hit her then as she saw the big stain on Danny's hoodie, a puddle of sweat that had formed where he'd been leaning against the bookshelf the majority of the time. She didn't think she'd want to feel heat again until they were all instructed to leave, that it was safe, and she felt the May sunshine touch her face. 

The sun felt the same when it hit her skin and she wasn't sure she expected it to be any different, but she appreciated it, she supposed, a small fraction more than she had when she'd woken up this morning. 

Ted's arm suddenly wasn't around her anymore and she searched in the chaos that ensued as they were all bombarded by FBI and various other law enforcement personnel, but couldn't find him. 

Danny came from seemingly nowhere -- a look of happiness she couldn't understand just yet filling his face -- and quickly guided her to an older agent, taller, slightly broad, dark hair, dark eyes -- eyes that held a sadness and warmth at the same time...eyes, she thought, that had seen too much evil and not enough good; eyes that brought her to him and seemed to say, 'You don't have to run anymore.' 

"I'm Agent Jack Malone, " he spoke, a hand wrapping around hers, "we uh -- we spoke on the phone." 

He smiled around the statement and it struck her instantly that this was the man she had met on the street...the man that had been finding her dreams. This was the man...that could save her. 

She returned the grip, replying, "Jan -- uh...Samantha Spade." 

He smiled again and pulled her into him and she fell away from the fuzzy memory that had once been her life. His arm went to her shoulder and he pulled her away from the crowd, into a car. 

"I've been looking for you." 

He spoke with gentle, blunt honesty and something in the way he said it made her chest tighten -- someone had been looking...for _her_. She had been somehow important enough to be found, important enough to distinguish her from thousands of others who had run away as well. She had been important enough to be given a chance -- a chance to live again and be the Samantha Spade she'd imagined when she was a little girl. 

"You found me, " she said lightly, spreading her hands in front of her. 

"Your mother contacted me a few days ago, wanted us to find you." 

Her hand shook as it tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. 

"My mother?" 

He nodded. 

"She missed you." 

"I missed her, " she replied, barely above a whisper. 

"You've been gone a long time." 

She looked away, out the window, watched the people leave her view as they pulled away from the chaos. A long time...yes...longer than anyone who'd really been living should be gone. She saw Ted, met his eyes as they left. 

"Who's that with Ted?" 

"Agent Vivian Johnson. We met Ted last night at your apartment building. He was a little upset when we told him your real name, but he'll be fine, " he tried to reassure her. 

She watched Vivian Johnson question her friend and understood with clarity why a lingering detachment still swam in his eyes: he knew her real name and she had lied to him. 

* 

"Samantha?" 

She seemed to test the name as she said it, though she'd been saying it at least once a day to the empty rooms and frozen faces trapped in pictures on her walls in that lonely place that had once been home -- that place where Janet and Samantha Spade had once been mother and daughter. 

"Mom?" 

The voice sounded familiar and the eyes were the same, but her mother had changed -- changed in all the ways people who lose something do. As though they lose themselves along with the person they lost each day. 

The eyes were the same color, but not even close to the pure, loving eyes they had once been. They had been sad, yes, in large part from her father, but big and broad as well...akin to a wide hug that seemed to envelope Samantha completely each time she looked at her. 

Her mother had lost that innocence along with her daughter and what remained were two eyes that had once been whole -- two eyes that fell into the darkness as she waited each day for the door to open and her daughter's sneakers to squeak on the tile as she tossed her backpack on the nearest chair. 

She had waited for that sound for a decade and it had never come and she hadn't wanted to die without simply knowing for sure what had happened or see the woman her daughter had become. 

They moved towards each other with hesitant steps, as though they were learning who the other was all over again. Janet reached out first and pulled Samantha to her, pulled her tighter when her daughter's arms reciprocated the hug and wrapped around her feeble back. 

"Don't ever leave, " her mother whispered. 

And they cried together. 

* 

Jack took the liberty of wiping away Sydney Harrison's name from the whiteboard. He had sent Martin and Kathy and a few other agents to get her after they'd gotten her location from a remorseful Barry Mashburn. Jack almost felt sorry for the man, though they'd spoken very little. He could understand the loss the man suffered and could empathize with it, but he shook his head in silent admonishment at what the man had done. 

They hadn't understood the meaning behind the $687,000, and there certainly had to be one because a number as exact and even small as that, for hostage takers, had to be rooted in some defining moment from the past. 

Maybe one day they would know, but he didn't want to dwell on the technicalities of it anymore. It was dark and he needed to get away from this place. He glanced over at the now empty room where Janet and Samantha had once stood, mere hours ago, embracing like they'd lose each other again if one looked away for only a second. 

The closet sentamentalist, he had smiled in spite of himself at the tearful reunion. 

He had to leave, had to get away, but he wasn't sure just where to go, so his thoughts wandered as he gathered up some things. 

His thoughts wandered to Samantha and the unspoken, undeniable, and almost unbelievable connection he had been feeling to her all along, the connection that had only solidified when he finally saw her and they didn't lose each other again. 

* 

He'd searched for her and found her and now, even back in her quiet apartment, she wasn't alone. 

The crushing weight of emptiness she'd weathered for so long had been relieved when he placed a steady hand on her back and led her slowly into the shaking arms of her mother. 

In that moment, she'd been a child again, returned to the world of princesses and dragons and heroes, only this time the dragon had been silenced with words instead of a sword and her hero was a gentle man with sad eyes, reassuring hands and a warm heart. 

Jack Malone. 

His voice had saved her, his arms had welcomed her and as she stayed the darkness in her silent room, just the thought of him renewed her. 

* 

He wanted to see the city the way she did, and so he walked. 

The fiery heat of the day faded into a balmy night complete with a slight breeze that, when it swirled around him, seemed to liven his step and bolster his soul as he continued, heading to a place procedure told him he shouldn't but every part of him said he should. 

Jack had learned, many times over, that often life was better lived when he did what he felt and ignored what he knew. 

He felt this. He felt her. 

He clutched Samantha's address in his left palm, but it wasn't necessary. The numbers and names and her face and quiet smile were branded so deeply inside they were like a part of him. 

This connection to her, it was frightening not because it was so new, but because it wasn't. 

He'd carried it with him since he first glimpsed her, seventeen years old with a world of experience captured in that single photograph, but he hadn't recognized its depth until the moment their eyes met and he knew he would feel her forever. 

_Soulmate._

The word made it's way into Jack's mind, and he turned it over as he continued walking. He wasn't sure where it came from until Vivian's words again echoed inside of him. 

_We're meant to find her._

Meant to find her...were they? As soon as Janet Spade stepped into his office and pleaded with him to find her daughter, he'd vowed to bring Samantha home. 

For her mother. 

For himself. 

There was no logic or reason he could call upon to explain that he'd known her from the moment he saw her picture and needed her from the first time he heard her voice and saw the loneliness and desperate hope in his own eyes reflected back in hers. 

To hell with logic and reason. 

He continued through the dimly lit streets of New York City, of his city and hers, and thought that maybe, they'd both been saved today. 

* 

She opened the door and stopped breathing. 

He stood in front of her, tie hanging loose around his neck, a quiet, shy smile crossing his lips, dark eyes searching her own as she tried to slow her racing heart. 

"Jack." 

"I, uh..." For the life of him, he couldn't think, couldn't find the right words to explain to her his reason for being here. 

He didn't have to. 

She reached out, watching her own hand in fascination as it closed warmly around his and tugged gently. 

"Come in." 

He did. 

* 

Her hand remained wrapped around his as he stepped inside, and maybe it was the warmth of his touch or the light in his dark eyes, but somehow, she knew he was here for more than extra questioning about the hostage situation or her own case. 

"You're alone," he observed quietly, glancing around her apartment. 

"Not anymore," was her response as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and met his heavy gaze. "Ted and I still have some things to work out, and Mom..it was a lot to take in, you know?" Her voice caught, and she led him to her worn couch. 

They sat, both leaning forward as she continued. 

"She's staying at a hotel nearby. It's just so overwhelming. Ten years, Jack." Tears pricked her eyes. "She's so different now." 

"So are you," he gently reminded her. "I saw you. A picture of you, when you were seventeen. You've both been to hell and back." 

The honesty in his voice was almost more than Samantha could take, and a few errant tears spilled over. She wiped them away, hard. "I'm sorry. You don't want to listen to this." 

Jack caught her hand on its way to her face, and held it softly between his own. She stared at him, moisture streaking her cheeks, questions rising in her eyes. 

"I saw you," he repeated. "I saw you then and I never forgot you. I found you, and I don't want to lose you. So I _do_ want to listen." 

It had been so long since someone had looked this deeply into her eyes, her heart, her soul. It had been..forever, and all she could think of was pulling him closer, gripping his shirt and coat and anything she could find, burying her head in his chest as his arms closed around her. 

Nothing had ever felt more natural to Jack Malone than sitting in this dark room on this couch, holding this woman to him..this woman who had been broken and put back together far too many times in her young life...a woman who's shattered strength he now held onto as tightly as she held onto him. 

She had belonged to him the moment he saw her. 

His mind had memorized her before he met, before he knew the love he'd always wanted and she'd been that love in shadows. 

His heart had loved her...forever. 

And he belonged to her when she breathed. 

* 

[ end ] 


End file.
